CRASH

​By

R. M. Francis

He was already dead, but when the police turned up Graeme was straddled over his limp body, hands on either side of his face, thrusting the back of his skull into the pavement. His ribs had been smashed as he flew through the windscreen and hit the deck, lungs punctured, drowned in his own bleeding. Graeme was focused. Eyes glazed in wide rage.

“The car’s airbag didn’t go off, your honor,” QC Smythe said.

Graeme couldn’t have foreseen that. Besides, he wanted him alive. Wanted to see what his fists were still capable of. Wanted him to see the face of the man who put an end to his life. Wanted him to know, to beg Graeme’s mercy. He’d planned. Dreamed. Please, Graz, it ay what yo’ think, he’d say. He’d say, lemme just explain. But he knew all he needed to know and everyone else knew too and they knew if you cross one of the Gummy Twins, whoever you are, that was your lot.

Ken was Graeme’s brother. Identical twins. The Gummy Twins, we all called them. When we were fourteen, Ken got his front teeth knocked out with a cricket bat over Swan Pool Park – Houghton was the only one allowed to deal down there. Houghton was hard too and he was mates with the Colliers.

“A patch is a patch, yo’ know,” Houghton said. “Let one fucker in an’ yo’ll let any number of ‘em.”

Years later, Ken made the headlines of the Express and Star and one of the slots on Crimewatch. It was the same summer as the riots across England. They called it rioting, but it was looting as far as we saw. A few on our estate went up West Brom and Handsworth to tip a few cars. The families in King’s Heath and Moseley came up with brooms to clear up the mess a few days later. We pissed ourselves at that. Fucking suck ups. Ay they the ones who’m meant to hate the corporate tossers?

“Took me ten minutes,” he told us all in The Queens Head. He made sure we all heard. “I ‘ad a screwdriver an’ an ‘ouse brick.”

He’d run the length of Hagley High Street – that’s where all the poshos lived – and he’d jacked fifteen car radios.

“Thass gorra be a record, ay it?” he said.

The twins had been about twenty-three at that point. Graeme was always the quiet one. That night, after Crimewatch, he’d crept out to the garden shed. He stared at the window, blacked in the night-time, looked and looked with that stare he had. That stare they both had. He grinned. Picked up the old man’s hammer and smashed his own teeth out. The Gummy Twins.

“... and the victim wasn’t wearing a seatbelt,” QC Smythe carried on.

Graeme didn’t plan for that either. He wanted to stop the car, maybe ruin it, but he wanted it done with hands and head and feet and to feel the bone, the flesh, the blood, the breaking. He wanted to feel it. Like the time Smithy wanted to prove something after Ken had fucked Sadie – Graeme held his head under the water of the brook on Amblecote Rec and he told Ken, who told all of us, that he could feel his shoulders give up with a shiver and he knew he was about to drown. Smithy joined the Army and got the fuck out town.

The Gummy Twins didn’t figure that the police had fingerprint records of Ken to go with the CCTV footage so the teeth play, hard as it was, day work. Ken got serious time. Graeme stopped coming out. He did night shifts at Tesco and that was it. I saw him walking home a couple of times.

“Alright, Graz?” I said. He nodded. Flicked his eyes to me and away again. Walked on. Eyes sunken, weighed down with deep bruise-coloured bags. He was always the quiet one. It was sort of what John Wayne might’ve called the thousand yard stare – only a thousand yard glance. It lasted a mini-second but that flick of his eyes stabbed at me, gorged at something.

“I sid Graz yesterday mornin’,” I told John.

“I ay sid ‘im since Ken got sent down,” he said. “‘Ow long’s it bin?”

“Two years out of five,” I said. “Anyway, ‘e day look right an’ the way ‘e looked at me. Fuck.”

“‘E was always the one yo’d watch. Ken’s mad an’ a bit of a nutter, but Graz is on another planet. ‘E’s dad said the sem to me about ‘em when they was babs.”

“Warrappened to their Dad?”

“Did a stretch … stabbed the mother. The twins were seven or eight, I reckon.”

“Fuckin’ ‘ell.”

“I know, ar. Explains a lot, doh it?”

“Is that the wench yo’ see with the spacka legs?”

“Down the bookies? With the drool? Thass ‘er, ar.”

“Poor wench.”

Sadie’d told me, up The Chequers one night, said how the Dad used to disappear for three days at a time and turn up pissed and nick the mom’s money. That night, they were woken and creeped out of their bunkbeds, tiptoed the landing and peered through the gap in the door. Boot heels stamped on lithe neck. Fists full of greasy hair. Blood. She went to hospital for six weeks, had rehab for months. The twins got put into care. The twins got separated.

“I reckon thass where it all stems from,” Sadie said. “They were on theya own, an’ yo’ know what they says about twins, doh yo’? Thass when it all went to shit.”

“‘Ow long did this go on for?” I asked her.

“Two years. They’d a bin ten I reckon, and they wor gonna split again.”

I told her about his stare. She just nodded and raised her eyebrow – she’d seen those eyes too.

And he definitely saw them. He’d have felt that thousand yard eye-balling as he looked left at the crossroads and saw Graeme doing fifty in John’s Golf and swerving and clashing the driver side panel and sending him up and through the windscreen to flop on the bonnet. Graeme dragged him off the car by his collar, he was in the same shirt from that day in court. Graeme kicked his gut and stamped at his head. Nose split and plastered like clay across face. Graeme straddled him and sat on his chest. Took chin in one hand unleashed his fist against the eye socket. Swelling. Reddened. Blue. Graeme looked down at him and spat. He’d have seen Graeme’s stare and he’d have known which of his sons it was.